4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
DNA on an Empty Bottle
Rescue missions have protocols. Pick up your drunk, muddy sister. Don't let her throw evidence out the window. Retrieve said evidence before reporters notice. Explain that home doesn't exist anymore—police found the car, traced the plates, and now every familiar street has become hostile territory. Some rescues end with relief. Others end with towels spread across seats and the realisation that nowhere is safe anymore.
When strangers stop to help, you can measure how badly you've fallen by whether they suggest hospitals or police. Gladys trips over a branch, drops her empty shiraz bottle, and starts crying in the mud whilst cars pass without slowing. Then Chloe and Adam pull over with concern that curdles into alarm when Gladys refuses help, knocks Adam's phone away, and swings the bottle in panic.
Beatrix arrives to find reporters documenting the spectacle. "Gladys! Get in the car!" The extraction is messy—Gladys stumbling past bewildered strangers, collapsing into towel-lined seats, clutching the bottle like a trophy.
Then she throws it out the window.
Beatrix slams the brakes. "Go and get it. It's evidence now. It has your DNA all over it."
The conversation that follows is worse than the retrieval. Police found the abandoned car at Myrtle Forest. Traced the registration. Know everything. "You can't go home now. Not ever."
But Snowflake still needs feeding. So they park at Mum and Dad's house—the place that was once Beatrix's too, before Portal Keys made home a concept instead of a location. Some threads tying them to normal life are already severed. The rest are fraying fast.
